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Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. ...
by Francis Bacon

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
- Francis Bacon

Related topics: Life Human-Nature Psychology Cynical

This communicating of a man's self to his friend
works two contrary effects;
for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
- Francis Bacon

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
- Francis Bacon

Little do men perceive what solitude is,
and how far it extendeth.
For a crowd is not company,
and faces are but a gallery of pictures,
and talk but a tinkling cymbal,
where there is no love.
- Francis Bacon

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Those that want friends to open themselves unto
are cannibals of their own hearts.
- Francis Bacon

A man cannot speak to his son, but as a father;
to his wife, but as a husband;
to his enemy, but upon terms:
whereas a friend may speak, as the case requires,
and not as it sorteth with the person.
- Francis Bacon

Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde

Talent is God-given; be humble.
Fame is man-given; be thankful.
Conceit is self-given; be careful.
- John Wooden

No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

Two things a man should never be angry at:
what he can help,
and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller

If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

If thou wilt make a man happy,
add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
- Epicurus

There are other measures of self-respect for a man,
than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I am getting ready to reason with a man,
I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself
and what I am going to say
and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
- Abraham Lincoln

A man's good name is his best monument
- from an old churchyard at Lockerbie, Scotland

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for,
he isn't fit to live.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a sufficiency in the world
for man's need but not for man's greed.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Money has never made man happy, nor will it,
there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness.
The more of it one has the more one wants.
- Benjamin Franklin

If a man empties his purse into his head,
no man can take it away from him.
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
- Benjamin Franklin

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy.
What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
- Carl Jung

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready
for his opportunity when it comes.
- Benjamin Disraeli

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live
that his happiness shall depend
as little as possible on external things.
- Epictetus

Intent is what can make a man succeed
when his thoughts tell him that he is defeated.
- Carlos Castaneda

The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man
are fixed upon the same creation;
but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
- Albert Pike

Before you criticize a man,
walk a mile in his shoes.
- Anonymous

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question
than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing,
and that is that I know nothing.
- Socrates

If a man does his best, what else is there?
- George S. Patton

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
- The Bible

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.
- Mark Twain

A man who as a physical being
is always turned toward the outside,
thinking that his happiness lies outside him,
finally turns inward and
discovers that the source is within him.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Is the babe young? When I behold it,
it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
- Henry David Thoreau

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
- Henry David Thoreau

You cannot teach a man anything;
you can only help him find it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me,
that man with all his noble qualities...
still bears in his bodily frame
the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
- Charles Darwin

Whatever your life's work is, do it well.
A man should do his job so well that the living,
the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

A man in debt is so far a slave.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only
by the man who is as well organized
in his individuality as the mass itself.
- Carl Jung

Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding
and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Behind an able man there are always other able men.
- Chinese proverb

A man can succeed at almost anything
for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.
- Charles M. Schwab

You cannot build character and courage by
taking away a man's initiative and independence.
- Abraham Lincoln

A man is but the product of his thoughts -
what he thinks, he becomes.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences,
in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures -
and that is the basis of all human morality.
- John F. Kennedy

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
- Henry David Thoreau

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance;
the wise grows it under his feet.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

When I look back on all these worries,
I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed
that he had had a lot of trouble in his life,
most of which had never happened.
- Winston Churchill

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives
and not in what he is able to receive.
- Albert Einstein

A man is a success if he gets up in
the morning and gets to bed at night,
and in between he does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan

I cannot trust a man to control others
who cannot control himself.
- Robert E. Lee

Any man who reads too much
and uses his own brain too little
falls into lazy habits of thinking.
- Albert Einstein

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
- John Morley

A man is not old until his regrets take the place of his dreams.
- Yiddish Proverb

A great secret of success is to go through life
as a man who never gets used up.
- Albert Schweitzer

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys
the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist,
and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
- Albert Schweitzer

Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.
- Epicurus

Many a man fails as an original thinker
simply because his memory is too good.
- Nietzsche

Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis
of man's desire to understand.
- Neil Armstrong

The more a man can forget, the greater the number
of metamorphoses which his life can undergo,
the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Man plans, God laughs
- Yiddish Proverb

During the first period of a man's life
the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
- Soren Kierkegaard

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks-
if we agree with him.
- Mark Twain

How could man rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
- Lao Tzu

The ultimate test of a man's conscience
may be his willingness to sacrifice something today
for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
- Gaylord Nelson

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie